Knowledge Sharing on Agile Projects: Absent or Abundant?
Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.
Knowledge transfer and sharing on agile teams differs from traditional approaches in both form and the internal versus external focus. Agile teams produce few of the traditional knowledge transfer, yet their daily practices focus on knowledge transfer. While agile teams spend much of their time transferring information internally, they share little with external groups other than the evolving product or service they create. These differences lead to some polarizing views of knowledge sharing and transfer on agile projects.
Some people see agile projects as knowledge transfer deserts where information is hoarded by key individuals and no useful documentation produced. Others believe agile projects are all about knowledge transfer. So why the disagreement? How can smart, experienced people have such different views about the same topic? It comes down to what we consider knowledge transfer and sharing to be.
A requirements specification document should be a great vehicle for sharing knowledge and transferring it from analysts to developers. It is a permanent record of requirements that can be read by many people and referred back to when needed. If questions or the need for clarifications arise, go look in the requirements specification. This works well for stable, unchanging requirements that can be gathered comprehensively up front.
Baselined plans are great …
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